Page:The Air Force Role In Developing International Outer Space Law (Terrill, 1999).djvu/16

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Professor John Cobb Cooper and first graduating class from McGill University’s Institute of Air and Space Law. From left to right: David Upsher (Canada), unidentified, Ming-Min Peng (Taiwan), Ishmael Abdulmonein (Egypt, partially obscured behind Peng), Ian McPherson (Canada), Jean Nemeth (Hungary), Dean Meredith (dean of McGill’s Law School), Hamilton DeSaussure (United States), Dr. Cooper, Constantine Vaicoussis (Greece), Dr. Julian Gazdik (Poland, Institute’s associate director), John Fenston (Canada), and Niky Hesse (Germany).

Cooper’s article led to a clamor by academics and international jurists for a definition of outer space. Their efforts to achieve a clear delimitation between airspace and outer space were driven by the hope that outer space might be “saved from the chaos of national rivalries.”[1] They theorized that once outer space was defined by international agreement, all claims regarding it would be easily resolved. These scholars and jurists likewise theorized that freedom of exploration in outer space would evolve similarly to the exploration of the sea. Otherwise, it was feared that the “outcome of the growing interest in outer space [would] result in a constantly increasing clash of interest between those statesmost interested in outer space, and between [their] citizens.”[2] Prince Welf Heinrich of Hanover of the Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung[3] (the [German] Society for Space Flight) noted that nations did not have the same needs and interests in outer space as they had in airspace. He

  1. Ibid.
  2. Welf Heinrich, Prince of Hanover, Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung, “The Legal Problems of Space,” trans. Robert W. Schmidt (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Documentary Research Division, Research Studies Institute, 1953), 1.
  3. The society, founded by the well-known German-Romanian scientist / mathematician Hermann Oberth, among others, in 1927, eventually became the most influential of the European rocket societies. See David N. Spires, Beyond Horizons: A Half Century of Air Force Space Leadership, rev. ed. (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1998), 5.